The blog for the cult Manhattan cable-access TV show that offers viewers the best in "everything from high art to low trash... and back again!" Find links to rare footage, original reviews, and reflections on pop culture and arthouse cinema.

Saturday, June 25, 2016

I’m not sure if Hal Willner is a national treasure yet
(despite grey hair, he’s not that old). He most certainly is a NYC treasure,
though, thanks to the tribute concerts he produces each summer. This year, the
Willner shows came early — a week of curated events at John Zorn’s Stone club
ran last week, June 14-19. I attended four of the seven shows and was, as
always with his work, bowled over by the high quality of the events and the
complete lack of press/Net recognition that they even occurred.

So it’s time for another Willner round-up (I wrote about his 2014 events at the Stone here). All four of the shows were sublime but the
first and last were extra-special for a number of reasons. In fact, the first
was so terrific that I’d count it as one of the best shows I’ve seen in many a
month. There is something about the no-frills nature of Willner’s shows that
makes them more impressive than big-budget extravaganzas.

It’s been 25 years since Willner produced Amarcord
Nino Rota, the first of his famous tribute albums (every one of which
is worth your time and attention). To celebrate this milestone he gathered an
11-person band that performed most of the album, with Rota’s
Godfather theme thrown in for good measure.

The Rota tribute. Photo by Bruce Pross.

The result was an incredible hour and a half of beautifully
played music. Without a single Fellini image being projected, it was one of the
finest tributes to Il Maestro than I could imagine. It would be unfair to
single out any one of the musicians, so I’ll just mention the four
arranger-performers: Karen Mantler, Steven Bernstein, Giancarlo Vulcano, and
Steve Weisberg.*

Willner served as the m.c. for the event, offering accounts
of two meetings with Fellini. He initially played him the album over a Walkman,
and Fellini gave him the title for the project. The second time around he
presented the finished album to the filmmaker, not realizing that the lady who
is emblazoned on the front cover in a great photo from Juliet of
Spirits, Sandra Milo, had written a tell-all memoir, which had
recently been published and told stories about Fellini that he was none too
pleased with.

Willner’s other “editorial note” concerned The
Godfather score, which had its Oscar nomination pulled because Rota was
accused of having recycled themes from 8 1/2 . Hal then
noted that The Godfather Part II did win for its score, but
that it reworked themes from Rocco and His Brothers.

Thankfully, a poster named "Il Grand Waz" has posted an eight-minute segment from the show on Facebook, and has kept it "unlocked" for public viewing. See it here.

The sheer joy of being in a small venue with eleven
top-flight musicians playing the chronically bouncy (yet strangely wistful)
music of Rota set the bar so high that I couldn’t believe anything could match
that performance. The second night was a bit looser (Willner noted there was
little rehearsal done for one half of the show). It was a blending of two
humorous takes on “beat” language, Ken Nordine’s “Word Jazz” albums and Del
Close and John Brent’s 1959 comedy LP How to Speak Hip.

The show was driven by a small jazz ensemble, with four
performers providing the verbal silliness. Laurie Anderson and Willner handled
the Nordine pieces, while Adam McKay (yes, the director of Will Ferrell
vehicles and The Big Short) and Steve Higgins (the announcer
on the Fallon Tonight Show) tackled the Close/Brent shtick.
Willner and McKay were good, but Higgins was surprisingly great as a late
Fifties hipster and Anderson was naturally note-perfect doing the Nordine bits.

On the third night, it was Willner and two DJ friends, Martin
Brumbach and “Mocean Worker” (Adam Dorn), creating an imaginatively weird and
lively tribute to producer Joel Dorn. Willner named the event after his only
“solo” album, Whoops I’m an Indian, but the items being
mixed and sampled were quite different from the contents of the original LP.

Using Dorn’s recordings as a base for the soundscape they
were creating, the three DJs — Brumbach and Dorn on computers, Willner on a
portable record player — overlaid beats, orchestral and jazz snippets, gospel
vocals, random noises (at least one courtesy of the indispensable Spike Jones),
and odd instrumental sounds Hal created with his iPad as well. Comedy record geek that I am, I was most impressed that Willner interjected bits of
W.C. Fields (“The Temperance Lecture”), Laurel and Hardy (from
Blockheads, Lord Buckley (“The Nazz”), and a
Yiddish-oriented comedian I’ve never heard of (Marty Gale, the LP title:
Sexy Stories with a Yiddisha Flavor).

The Dorn tribute. Photo by
Steve Weisberg.

One could sense the respect the trio of mixers had for Joel
Dorn’s work because, as the show went on, the Dorn-produced pieces of music
were increasingly left alone. Also interesting was Willner’s “mad professor”
approach to DJ-ing — he clearly has an amazing record collection and an
encyclopedic knowledge of popular music. He also was, oddly, tossing the LPs
and record covers onto the floor, leaving me wincing about possible scratches
(although when he did this you could indeed get a good gander at some of the
covers — including items he chose not to sample, including the kiddie record
Let’s Have a Puppet Show).

Willner crafted three “finales” for this week of shows. I
couldn’t go to the final two — a prior appointment with a movie festival kept
me away from a show centered around Band legend Garth Hudson, and I had seen a
prior performance of “Doing the Things We Want To,” the tribute show that
found Hal and actress Chloe Webb reading the works of Lou Reed, Kathy Acker,
and Allen Ginsberg, while backed by a great rock-jazz band. (For posterity, I
will note that there was a late show earlier in the week at the Stone in which
Willner read from Ginsberg’s work with piano accompaniment by NRBQ’s Terry
Adams.)

The “finale” I did see, which rivalled the Fellini/Rota show
for its tightness and joyous “party” vibe, was “Let’s Eat — Feasting on the
Firesign Theater.” I should confess at the outset that the Firesign has never
been one of my favorite comedy acts, but watching their bits performed as scripted radio comedy — again, with a sublime jazz backing — was sheer bliss.

As always with Willner’s shows, the ensemble he put together
was a primary attraction (in this case I knew the work of several of the acting
participants, but even if you don’t, Hal’s shows are a terrific gathering of
talent). A total of seven musicians under the direction of Steve Weisberg
offered a beautiful jazz backing to the comedy (with Weisberg on keyboards and Rob
Scheps on sax qualifying as MVPs).

The cast of actors playing multiple roles in each Firesign
sketch was equally impressive. Willner, SNL writer Jim Downey,
Altman collaborator, scripter, and composer Allan Nichols, and John Ventimiglia
(The Sopranos) played the male parts (the first three gentlemen
demonstrating that they may have indeed listened to these albums over and over
again when they were younger). The welcome twist put on the original material —
besides the insanely good jazz backing — was that three women played the female
roles and random other voices: Vera Baron, Janine Nichols, and Chloe Webb.

The original cast: the Firesign Theater in "Nick Danger"

The ensemble performed one of my favorite Firesign bits, the
parody of old-time radio private eye shows “The Adventures of Nick Danger” (in
this case the full-length episode from the second side of How Can You
Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All)). The show
had relatively low attendance (NYCers will only come out to shows that have
been declared cool, hip, or otherwise “essential” by some website or publication).
But that didn’t change the dynamic of the performance, which was indeed like a
party — a party at which surreal, conceptual humor from decades ago was
celebrated with many odd but welcome twists and turns.

As with the Nordine/”Hip” show, a full jazz band wasn’t
required by the material, but they were indeed a bonus for those in attendance.
Willner’s small-venue shows find him indulging all his tastes, and the players
he recruits make the events all the more memorable. Hal is producing a free
tribute to his friend Lou Reed at Lincoln Center on July 30. I’m not sure who
or what material will be included, but it’s certain that this won’t your average
“songbook” concert.

One can’t help but be grateful for Willner’s annual salutes in
NYC to poets, legendary film composers, conceptual comedians, music producers, and
cult performers and musicians. It’s just a matter of waiting for the next show
he produces and wondering what he’ll take on next year….

Thursday, June 9, 2016

So much has been said about Muhammad Ali as an athlete, an
entertainer (for he surely was that), and as a civil rights icon. The guy was a
hero in a bunch of ways, but one of those ways isn't talked about as much,
because it made us all “uncomfortable” while it was going on. I'm referring to
his dealing with Parkinson's, and the fact that he didn't shrink from the
spotlight even after he admitted he had it. (He had been denying it for
some time before that.)

His obits were accompanied by images of him as a champion boxer, a lot
of them using the famous photo of him looming over Sonny Liston (which in and
of itself was a victory but a cloudy one – read Nick Tosches' The
Devil and Sonny Liston for more details). However, the most
stirringly heroic image of his life for me wasn't when he was young, lean,
clever, articulate, and “pretty” (the word he most often used in interviews to describe
himself). It was when he lit the Olympic torch in 1996.

At the time I was younger and found it upsetting, seeing him
in that condition. Now that I'm older I realize that it truly was a heroic act
– letting the world see him in that state, one hand shaking wildly. Yet he did
it, proudly showing he could do the task he was called up on to do. He was relatively young, a middle-aged man of 54 at that time and gravely
afflicted by Parkinson’s, and while he was not the Ali of old (the loss of his
dazzling verbal skills was indeed heartbreaking), he was still an athlete and a
proud individual. The only footage of the event that is not punctuated by unnecessary talking heads can be found here.

The last surprise he had for us was when he spoke about the
9/11 attacks on a charity program, urging Americans not to associate the
attacks with the Muslim faith as a whole. By that point Muhammad no longer
consented to interviews, and the public perception was that he was incapable of
audible speech. But he came out and delivered a message of tolerance that,
while clearly rehearsed and scripted, was a triumph for those who had written
him off as a “sad victim of Parkinson’s.”

He of course wasn’t the Ali of old, playing with words like
he toyed with his opponents, but it was a touching moment to hear him speak
about something that mattered to him deeply. Even while stricken with an
irreversible ailment he was a man of principle who was fine with being seen in
public in an “unflattering” (but still majestic) state.

Ali’s condition in the last three decades (plus) made many argue
that he should’ve quit boxing sooner, or that the sport should be outlawed entirely.
Both of those options make sense, but if the latter had happened before 1960,
we would’ve never been treated to some of the greatest moments in the sport,
courtesy of the “prettiest” of them all.